Reading the Aeroplane Over the Sea

I just posted about this book on GoodReads (for those of you who like to get your GoodReads on), but I realized that this post is also about an album (as well as being about a book), so I thought I’d add this post to Thom’s as well.

There is this series of books (which you can see here) and each book in the series is written about a specific album in music history (with one author assigned to each book). The series is called 33 1/3 (because of the speed of an LP album… hopefully that’s obvious). I’ve read a few books in this series, and (in general) I just wanted to mention the series because some of you may be interested in reading some of these books… they’re all pretty short books (somewhere between 120-200 pages each), but I just finished reading one on Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and I thought I’d post my reflections here… this is kind of a mixture of my reflections on the album as well as my reflections on the book about the album.

Before reading Kim Cooper’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea I had previously read a couple of other books in the 33 1/3 series (one on REM’s Murmur and the other on The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds). Murmur and Pet Sounds were both albums that I loved before reading the books about them; they were albums that I had already memorized backwards and forwards and I already loved every single note on those albums, and reading a book about each one of them only made me love those albums even more. But, with In the Aeroplane Over the Sea I had a very different experience. This was an album that I had never gotten into. It came out while I was in college, which should have been a time when I would have been ripe for enjoying this album, but I just never got into it… and I had heard pieces of it every now and then over the years since then, but for some reason it just never clicked with me… the only real explanation for why I had never gotten into it was because I just didn’t “get it”. I guess the timing was wrong, but it just never hit me in such a way that I really cared about it. For whatever reason (maybe it’s some of the music I’ve been getting into recently… music, which I now see, was heavily influenced by this monumental album), but (whatever it was) I was finally ready for this album. The timing was finally right (which, in all honesty, is so critical for enjoying so much music… you can’t force that timing, you just have to wait until the time is right to get into some specific bands and when the time is right it just works for some reason and there really is no other way to explain it).

I’ve now had this CD playing in my car non-stop for the past six months (yes, I still listen to CD’s… and it’s been in the six-disc CD-changer in my car for half a year now and I haven’t ejected it once). I’ve previously had the experience with albums where I continue to peel back layer after layer after layer of the beauty of an album and I continue to appreciate the album more and more over time… uncovering new layers of beauty and appreciation that had completely escaped me on all of my previous listening experiences of the album. (Really, all of my favorite albums in music history have given me this experience… that would be a very short list of albums… but I have enjoyed this experience with a decent number of albums, and it’s one of the things that I just plain love about music.) With Aeroplane that experience just kept happening… it kept happening every single time I made another lap through the album (and, over the past six months I feel safe in assuming that I’ve heard this album around a hundred times), and I just keep enjoying it more and more. What is it about this album that does that? I mean, it’s “raw”… to use that over-used music descriptor… but, it’s raw-er than raw, it’s not trying to be “raw” in the sense of heavy-metal or some kind of music that is trying to prove to you that it is raw, like it’s saying, “Hey, look at me, I’m music and I’m loud and I’m raw! Rarrrr!!!”… it’s “raw” in the sense of just jamming right into your chest without any pretense… it’s like jamming a meaty sandwich into your face with no condiments on it. It’s just there and it’s real and you taste it and it’s good and you can’t believe how simple it is but also how excellent it is… and yet, the more you experience it, you realize that’s it’s not simple at all… it’s anything but simple… what at first seemed so simple now has so many complex layers to it.

As far as the book is concerned, I really enjoyed the way Kim Cooper wrote… she took you back into the season that Jeff and the band were making this album and made you feel like you were living with them and riding around in the van with them and just getting to know them. I also appreciated the way she described the In the Aeroplace Over the Sea recording sessions… there have been other times when I have read articles or books where the writer talks about the recording process of an album and unless you have a Masters Degree in Engineering and Production you can’t understand a word they’re saying (that was actually one of the weaknesses to the book on Murmur in this series… the technical jargon was just too technical). But, at the same time, I love hearing how things were recorded and how certain sounds were captured in the studio, and when some bit of technical expertise during the recording process makes for a deeper understanding of the music, I think that’s awesome and I think Cooper was able to explain that really well and not make me feel completely lost. I also appreciated the way she talked through each song… she wasn’t trying to give some sort of word-for-word explanation of the lyrics, and thereby taking away from the individual enjoyment that each listener experiences with this album but at the same time she was able to add a lot of insight to songs that I never would have had a chance to uncover on my own. I have a very odd experience with the lyrics to songs. I memorize words to songs absurdly easy… and I’ll remember word-for-word songs that I haven’t heard in over ten years… but yet, I don’t really pay attention to lyrics very often (I’ll know every word in a song, but I’ll have absolutely no clue what that song is about). So, I have to confess my complete and utter ignorance in not realizing that Anne Frank was the main character (for lack of better term) of this album… how in the world I listened to (and sang along with) “Holland, 1945” and didn’t catch this (I mean the song is called “Holland, 1945!” Hello! World War II!), but nonetheless I was very grateful to read about a lot of the themes and inspirations behind a lot of the writing. I had absolutely no clue how to interpret the lyric “I love you, Jesus Christ” the first time I heard that line… I mean, even I (in all of my I-don’t-pay-attention-to-the-meaning-of-lyrics ignorance) at least caught that line and thought, “Uhh… I wonder why he’s saying that… is that sarcasm, or is this a bold and unapologetic profession of faith, or is this something totally different?” I appreciated her addressing some of the more overt lines like that as well as uncovering some other themes while also not trying to explain everything for the reader at the same time.

As the book progresses, once she gets to the point in the “story” when the album is actually released, the book picks up with a speed that the band must have also experienced once the album began to take off and receive critical acclaim as well as pretty decent sells. This book was really well written and helped me to peel back even more layers of enjoyment on an album that I continue to enjoy more and more. Now, who wants to go pick some Carrot Flowers?